Royal Opera House Restaurants have introduced an enticing range of menus to complement Royal Ballet and Royal Opera productions over the Christmas season with bar and food inspired by the various works on stage.

The matinee performance of Peter Wright’s Christmas classic The Nutcracker, for example, is accompanied by a magical afternoon tea.

Laura Irving, Royal Opera House Restaurants, explains:

“Our own culinary Sugar Plum Fairy, world-renowned pastry chef Claire Clark, has created a fantasy-filled menu that will delight adults and children alike. It features Christmas trees of chocolate fudge cake, nutcracker-illustrated macaroons, and pecan tarts topped with a curl of edible sheet music.”

A range of classic sandwiches - including Severn & Wye smoked and a cheese and ham option for the kids – also provide a savoury option, alongside scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream, a selection of premium teas and coffees, and champagne.

The evening Nutcracker menu also features seasonal treats, including beetroot-cured smoked salmon, pheasant, cranberries, brussel spouts and plum pudding, while Laurent Pelly’s production of Robert le diable is accompanied by an enticing menu of festive flavours, including ‘sauce diable’ to accompany confit free-range pork belly.

John Copley’s classic production of La bohème features a luxurious menu that includes a selection of very special French wines and a decadent choice of desserts, while the mixed programme of The Firebird, In the Night and Raymonda Act III features, fittingly, a Russian-inspired spread that includes blinis with smoked salmon.

Laura continues,

“With prices on some of the matinee menus starting at only £5, it’s like Christmas has come early. A combination of dinner and ballet really does make the perfect Christmas gift!”

For the 2012/13 Season, Royal Opera House Restaurants launched a tantalising range of new menus designed to complement each production on the Royal Opera House stage. Find out more about the new dining options.

Priority group booking for winter productions opens tomorrow (2 October), several weeks ahead of public booking. Group bookings offer visitors to the Royal Opera House the chance to see both popular favourites and brand new productions at discounted prices.

Groups can save up to 40% on tickets, making it the perfect opportunity to introduce first-time friends and family to ballet and opera. Other benefits include priority booking, a ‘book now, pay later’ arrangement and a dedicated group booking phone line.

Group booking offers for the Winter Season include Jonathan Kent's production of Puccini’s tragic Tosca.

After the success of La Bayadère Nureyev was back in John Tooley’s office hoping to persuade him and Frederick Ashton to let him stage another Russian classic, Petipa’s three-act Raymonda. This was a late masterpiece by the ballet master of the Imperial Ballet, according to the handful of people in the West who had seen it. "Fred would probably have described it as an 'old warhorse' and would have seen that it had both good and bad elements to it," Tooley suggests. "But this was going to be a huge investment and we kept asking ourselves, 'Are we right to invest this amount of money in a 19th-century ballet, even if it was choreographed by Petipa, when there are so many other works which we ought to think about doing?'"

Did Nureyev, coming from the Soviet system where budgets were as much political as economic, not understand the financial implications of staging Raymonda? "He was unaware of the cost of things," says John Tooley, "although he knew perfectly well about money. I vividly remember walking down Jermyn Street with him and we looked into a shop which had the most beautiful four-poster bed and Rudolf said, 'I’m going to get that!' And then he looked at it and said, 'No, I haven’t got enough money, so I’ll have to dance several times more so I can actually buy it!' He was aware of the fact that you had to get money to get things."

There was a compromise. If Nureyev wanted to make a three-act production of Raymonda then he would have to make it with The Royal Ballet’s second company. It was agreed that Nureyev and Fonteyn would dance Raymonda with The Royal Ballet touring company at the Spoleto Festival. But how to secure the Kirov’s version of the ballet with Petipa’s original choreography? Doreen Wells, who danced the first night in Italy in August 1964, likens it to the plot from a James Bond movie. "Nureyev could not fully remember all the ballet from his early years at the Kirov so it was necessary to smuggle the original choreography from St Petersburg as it had been when Petipa created the ballet in 1898. [And it was done] through a young Canadian ballet dancer who had a scholarship and could come and go easily to and from the Soviet Union. It was brought out in an empty thermos flask; the notes were provided by Nureyev’s great teacher and master Aleksandr Pushkin."

As rehearsals for Raymonda were under way, the plot thickened – to the point of curdling. John Tooley remembers the problems of trying to stage a full-length classical ballet away from the Company’s base with Nureyev falling out with his designer Beni Montresor. "Rudolf kept saying, 'This is no good. This is not what I want.' But it was all too late because we had to go on with what Beni had designed."

The final blow came days before the first night. Margot Fonteyn had to leave the Company to fly to her husband Roberto Arias, whose life was in danger following a shooting incident in Panama. Doreen Wells took Fonteyn’s place having learnt the title role in little more than 24 hours. The performance was a triumph.

Yet The Royal Ballet’s main company never took Nureyev’s three-act version of Raymonda into their repertory. A young Anthony Dowell saw the whole ballet in 1965 when Australian Ballet brought Nureyev’s version to London. "I realized even with my junior eyes that there wasn’t much substance to it in terms of story. Along with Don Quixote I think that it’s one of the thinnest plots ever." By Act III the meagre plot has become an excuse for pure dance. "Curiously enough Act III stands up quite well on its own," says John Tooley. "It’s a very good series of divertissements – a useful one-act addition to the repertory and a good representation of 19th-century Russian ballet."

So, as with La Bayadère, Rudolf Nureyev taught The Royal Ballet the final act of Raymonda. John Tooley often watched the rehearsals. "Rudolf was an immensely hard worker… He was endlessly demanding and he wouldn’t accept it when a dancer said, 'I can’t do this'. He would say 'Come on, you can'. And then he would stretch them beyond what they thought they could do."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RxC_3ZynC8

Monica Mason agrees with the suggestion that not everyone could cope with Rudolf. "It was the people who really weren’t afraid of working hard that he had the most patience with. If they were one hundred per cent committed, he would be the same. And he would go over and over something, just like he did for himself.

"He would always do full class in the morning and then take rehearsals at noon and sit on that chair at the front and jump up and demonstrate and then go back and sit down. He always watched from the front with his little woolly hat pulled down over his head to keep him warm."

But what about the famous Tartar temperament? "I don’t think that I was ever nervous of Rudolf or frightened of him. Later on when he became very exhausted and was unpredictable, then his moods used to unsettle and scare me. But not that much, because one knew that he got rid of his furies, venting them brilliantly! The swearing was terrible but you knew it was never personal!"

If The Kingdom of the Shades and, above all, Raymonda Act III, are Nureyev’s lasting legacy to The Royal Ballet, there is also something less tangible but just as important for the Company. Doreen Wells argues that, "he certainly changed the male dancer as far as The Royal Ballet was concerned. He made him more important." As Monica Mason will tell you, he also raised the bar for everyone in the Company: "Whenever he was on here at the Opera House everyone pulled their socks up; it always seemed to me the level just rose because of his great performing skills." Doreen Wells would go further: "He was a true star. It was his energy and his style. He really had the magic of the dance in his soul."

In the popular imagination Rudolf Nureyev was everything a classical dancer ought to be – larger than life and rarely out of the headlines. He was also the greatest male dancer of his generation and indubitably the most thrilling classical stylist of the second half of the last century. Those members of The Royal Ballet who were fortunate enough to have worked with Nureyev have never forgotten the experience. But he bequeathed more than great performances to The Royal Ballet. There’s a choreographic legacy too.

Of course, the dancing was sensational. Quite simply Rudolf Nureyev danced with a passion and style that audiences at Covent Garden and elsewhere in the West had never seen before. As Doreen Wells, who partnered Nureyev in his first production of the full-length version of Raymonda, remembers: "He was wonderful to dance with, very exciting. He had amazing energy."

It was restless energy that drove Nureyev’s dancing, just as it was a restless dissatisfaction with life in the Kirov company that had led him to defect at Le Bourget Airport in Paris in June 1961. Indeed, Nureyev’s whole career was characterized by a need to do new things and to do them differently. Having established a thrilling partnership with The Royal Ballet’s own star, Margot Fonteyn, giving her a new lease of creative life that was little short of miraculous, Rudolf Nureyev announced that he wanted to create his own productions as well as dance.

He had in mind two works that The Royal Ballet didn’t have in its repertory. La Bayadère and Raymonda were full-length ballets from the great Russian classical tradition that had been choreographed by Marius Petipa for the Imperial Theatre, the Mariinsky in St Petersburg, in the second half of the 19th century. They were ballets that Nureyev had learnt while growing up in the Kirov company that had inherited, and developed, the Russian classical tradition after the Revolution.

In 1963 Frederick Ashton had taken over the directorship of The Royal Ballet from De Valois and John Tooley was Assistant General Administrator of the Royal Opera House. And it was to Ashton and Tooley that Nureyev went with plans to stage La Bayadère. Tooley recalls the gist of the conversation: "Nureyev said he wanted to do these pieces while he could still remember them. These ballets were very much his heritage… and because of his standing within the Company and with audiences in London he thought, 'Well I’m going to push my luck here and see if I can persuade them to do them.'" Nureyev managed to push his luck only so far with John Tooley. "Rudolf ideally would have liked to do the whole of Bayadère. But we did say 'no', and since The Kingdom of the Shades was the most famous and the most appealing part of the ballet we thought, well, let’s do that for starters."

The result was Nureyev’s Kingdom of the Shades quite as much as Marius Petipa’s, as Anthony Dowell remembers. "He very much put his own mark on it. He created challenges, for example for the corps de ballet. In some productions of La Bayadère all those girls come on in the long line-up and go into their arabesques standing on one leg, which when you are dancing in a group is already pretty nerve-racking because you feel that if you wobble you’ll be seen even more. But instead of having them just standing, Rudolf made them dip into a penchée in the arabesque, which is even harder."

John Tooley says, "Rudolf pushed everybody to extremes. That long opening sequence was a real eye-opener for the corps de ballet because they had never been exposed to anything requiring such precision."

The former Director of The Royal Ballet, Monica Mason, who danced in Nureyev’s Bayadère, thinks it was the young Russian’s respect for The Royal Ballet’s British tradition that made him so attractive as a teacher and producer. "He never tried to make Royal Ballet dancers look like the Mariinsky dancers. I think that it was so generous and so intelligent really that he didn’t see our qualities as limitations. He saw us as a group of young people who were extremely keen to work for him and wanted to learn. He had lots to give us and we were as hungry as could be."

On Wednesday 17 October 2012, booking for Winter Season productions at the Royal Opera House opens for the general public. Booking for Winter Advanced Packages, which includes a Winter Family Package, has been open since 10 October.

The Royal Opera opens the Winter Season with Kasper Holten’s directorial debut Eugene Onegin. A production described by Kasper as a fresh reading of a classic opera, the titular role will be sung by Simon Keenlyside, who played the role of Macbeth in Covent Garden to critical acclaim in 2011. The season also features the hotly anticipated UK premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, for which director Katie Mitchell makes her Royal Opera main stage debut; Jonathan Kent’s much-loved production of the classic Tosca; and Daniele Abbado’s new production of Nabucco, which will feature Plácido Domingo in the title role.